Apocrypha
by Lisse
Summary: It is two months after Detroit and the Devil burns a man on the ceiling. Second verse, same as the first. (Or: the last surviving Winchester learns that saving the world isn't all it's cracked up to be. S5 AU with bonus apocalypse.)


So a while back I had two ideas:

1. What happens when Background Extra #5 gets roped into the whole apocalypse thing?  
2. Adam should get a chance to be the emo Winchester survivor for once.

Then I squashed them together and this thing happened. Yeah, I dunno either.

AU from 5x18, spoilers through 5x22.

* * *

**Apocrypha**

_apocrypha (n)_  
_Biblical or related writings not f__o_rming part of the accepted canon of Scripture.

* * *

It is one day after Detroit.

There are two people on an empty road. One has a destiny he should be fulfilling, somewhere; he is shaking with effort, hands clenched into fists, blood dripping down his fingers where his nails have gouged into his palms. The other is named Eli Davis, and he has not been and will never be important.

"This is the only chance anyone's gonna get," the bleeding man gasps out. "Please. _Please._"

Eli nods once.

He cuts the bleeding man's throat.

* * *

It is two months after Detroit.

Adam Milligan steers the Chevy down two-lane Illinois roads, eyes locked in front of him, and knows that there is something significant about what just happened. He can practically feel it in his bones. He doesn't need anyone to tell him, least of all his hunting partner.

"We need to figure out what is going on," Cas says anyway. He's in the passenger seat; normally he would be picking through the cassettes that Adam can't quite bring himself to throw away, but today his arms are folded and he's leaning his head against the window.

Adam uses the rear view mirror to spy on their new passengers in the back seat. The younger girl is sleeping the sleep of the traumatized and exhausted, but her older sister is wide awake. They are, in every way but one, completely and utterly ordinary.

And that's what this was supposed to be. A normal run-of-the-mill hunt. No signs. No omens. Just keeping people safe while the apocalypse happens in slow motion around them.

"You _think?_" he mutters.

Cas doesn't dignify that with an answer.

They are both still wearing their suits, now the worse for wear, and they both still have their fake FBI badges in their pockets. They are filthy and look like absolute hell, bloodied and bruised, and they are very _very_ lucky to be alive.

And the older girl is glaring at them, now.

Her name is Nia, he remembers. Nia Davis. Her little sister's name is Grace. Her father is - _was_ - Eli Davis, until he died in a way Adam wouldn't wish on anyone.

"You okay back there?" he asks, mostly for something to say.

Nia Davis snorts. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her little sister is using her shoulder as a pillow. "I just found out Satan is real and that he killed my dad," she bites out. "Yeah, I'm _fantastic_."

That's...about what Adam expected, really. "Any idea why he would go after your dad?"

"I thought knowing that stuff was your job."

They had only been in the area scouting out a report of demonic activity, Adam wants to say. They would never have gone into her house if Cas hadn't spotted the flicker of flames through the windows. "I'm kind of new at this, okay?"

"Oh, and that's why Dad died? Because you guys are _amateur_ demon hunters?" There is a disbelieving, sarcastic tone to Nia's voice that he recognizes. Just his luck, just his _fucking_ luck that the girl he rescued is starting to remind him of his older brother.

He grips the steering wheel tighter. "I didn't exactly see you helping. You were unconscious, remember? We're the ones who saved your ass."

Cas stops staring out the window long enough to look at him. For a monosyllabic guy with one of the best poker faces Adam has ever seen, he can communicate a lot by raising his eyebrows. Angel guilt trips are pretty powerful even when the person doing them isn't actually an angel anymore.

It's more effective than Nia's disbelieving eyeroll, anyway.

"I'm sorry about your dad," he says, turning most of his attention back to the empty road. It's dark and quiet outside; he doesn't glance at the clock in the Chevy, but he think it must be close to three in the morning. "And I'd really like to know what your sister did back there."

"That makes two of us," Nia mutters. Her expression softens as she looks down at her little sister, and Adam is suddenly and painfully reminded of the fact that she is all of eighteen years old. She's younger than he was when he lost his mother - when he _died._

So far, there has been a logic to the people and families Lucifer has killed: future prophets, vessels with important lineages, a faith healer up in Canada, a whole extended family of hunters in Argentina, a particularly holy imam in South Carolina. By contrast, the Davis sisters and their father are nothing significant. There was no reason for them to be targeted.

Except for the strange, impossible thing that Adam saw Grace Davis do.

"Is Gracie in danger?" Nia asks suddenly.

Cas doesn't look away from the window. "After what she did, you both are."

"Will you show me how to protect her?" There is something a lot like steel in her voice, and Adam is once again painfully reminded of his brother.

"I thought you said we were amateur hunters," he retorts.

"Amateur's better than nothing. And I'll be between her and Satan anyway, so you might as well give me a fighting chance."

She says it like it's a simple statement of fact. The sky is blue. Two plus two is four. Nia Davis will go toe to toe with Lucifer to save her little sister.

Adam scrubs a hand down his face. They really should pull over - he hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours and he can't remember the last time he ate anything - but the thought of leaving the Chevy, which has so many protective wards and seals that they cover it like an invisible second skin, is not something he wants to contemplate. Not until they're back in the relative safety of Sioux Falls.

"I'll think about it," he says at last.

Nia nods - Nia with her little sister, Nia with something powerful and horrible burning her family on the ceiling - and he knows deep in his bones that he's already decided.

* * *

Cas calls ahead, so when the Chevy arrives at Singer Salvage, Lisa is already waiting outside with a silver knife and a squirt gun full of holy water. There are big dark circles under her eyes and have been since the day Michael zapped her and her son here, but she still smiles wide when she sees them, like she somehow missed the memo that the end of the world is really fucking nigh.

Lisa had been one of Dean's conditions, apparently. Adam's pretty sure she still hasn't forgiven him for that.

Once everyone's been sliced open and sprayed in the face, Lisa ushers the girls into the house in search of clean clothes while Cas goes to touch up the angel scrawl he's covered the place with and Adam walks around the perimeter with Ben, checking devil's traps and salt lines like Sam taught him to while a ten-year-old with a shotgun watches his back. By the time he's done and they've gone back inside, the Davis sisters are sitting at the table in tee shirts and pairs of Lisa's yoga pants, sandwiches and mugs of hot tea set in front of them. Lisa herself is perched on the counter with her pistol set beside her.

"Did you try calling your angel yet?" he asks as he closes the door carefully behind him so as not to disturb the salt lines. "We need to get them hidden as soon as we can."

Lisa sighs. "She's not _my_ angel, and I did. She's not answering." She shoots a glance at the girls. Nia has found a steak knife from somewhere and is holding it like she really wants to stab something; Grace is biting her lip and peering down at her tea and generally looking a lot younger than fourteen.

"Right," Adam says as he slouches against the counter next to Lisa, trying not to hiss at the lingering pain in his ribs. "What did you do, Grace?"

Grace shakes her head and doesn't look up from her tea.

"You must have done _something_," he presses. Lisa shoots him a warning look, which he ignores. "He's _Lucifer_. He doesn't exactly leave people alive out of the kindness of his heart."

The headshake is even more vehement this time.

Adam knows he's right. He would bet his life on it - an expression that he takes a lot more literally now than he did before the ghouls. It's been two whole months since Detroit and whatever-it-was that happened after - _way to beat back Lucifer_, he thinks at Sam's memory, uncharitably and unfairly - and Grace Davis, one hundred percent ordinary human being though she claims to be, has managed to face down a fallen archangel and live. There has to be a reason for that.

"Grace," he begins.

She sets down her mug hard enough to splash hot tea all over the table. "You can ask me all you want," she grinds out through gritted teeth. Her hands are trembling, but something of her sister's steel shows in her eyes when she glowers at him. "I _don't know_."

He wonders if she knows how many lives she saved. He and Cas had not burst into the Davis house expecting to run smack into Lucifer, and his whole right side is one big bruise from where he got casually tossed against a wall. Lucifer had no reason to spare a former angel and a not-terribly-good hunter. They're alive because of Grace.

And despite the defensive hunch to her shoulders, Grace is peering up at him. "You're Adam?" When he nods, she can almost see the wheels spinning in his head. "I heard Satan say your name," she says after a long moment, somehow managing to make a simple statement of fact an accusation and a question at the same time. "You know him, don't you."

He can't begin to articulate all the ways he doesn't want to have this conversation. "Ask Lisa," he says. "Ask Cas. He's probably done with his angel graffiti by now."

Then he pushes off the counter and walks outside and closes his eyes against the feel of fresh cool air on his face. Months later and the idea of coming so close to an archangel - _any_ archangel - still makes him want to throw up.

* * *

This is what happened at the Davis house:

Eli Davis is screaming in agony. There is blood on the floors and on the walls, vast sprays of it, and the ceiling is covered in flames. Nia is collapsed in a heap, probably thrown clear across the room, and while Adam and Cas are still conscious, neither of them is in much better shape than she is.

And Grace is standing ramrod-straight and looking up at Lucifer, a brave little last stand that's surely been repeated hundreds and thousands of times before to no effect whatsoever. Tears run down her cheeks as she says _please, please, please_.

But the screams and the flames are too loud, and Adam can't hear what she is begging for.

* * *

Lisa tries to call Chuck Shurley, only for her calls to go directly to his overflowing voicemail. Then she calls Becky Rosen, who is very weird but is generally good at bullying the worst prophet in existence into coming out of his shell. Sure enough, within hours Chuck is calling Lisa back, telling her that everything is making his brain hurt and nothing's going the way his story says it should and that if they want to visit they have to bring enough alcohol to stock a major liquor store.

While she's wrangling Chuck, Cas turns everyone else loose on what Adam has termed Bobby's Library of Strange Shit in the hopes of finding some mention of Grace and her Lucifer-stopping powers. This has the unfortunate side effect of introducing Grace to Chuck's godawful books, which she takes to reading with a pack of Post-its sitting next to her, a gel pen clutched in one hand, and an air of deep concentration.

It turns out the girl everyone's trying not to pin their hopes on is a giant nerd.

After a week that produces nothing but cabin fever and awkward questions from Grace about Stanford and Samuel Colt and devil's traps, Lisa finally gets through to the mostly unwelcome angel bodyguard Michael gifted her with before he up and disappeared.

"I don't understand the point of this," said angel grumbles after Lisa yells at her to get down here _right the hell now_. She is extremely pretty, or at least the vessel she's wearing is, and her name is Sham-something. Shamsiel. Shamwow. "There is nothing to tell you about this child. She isn't important."

"That _child_ stopped _Lucifer_." Cas has that extra-intense expression he gets when he's dealing with other angels. It's some blend of jealousy and frustration that Adam hasn't been able to name and isn't sure he wants to. "We have never found anyone else capable of that. If she has a _chance_ - "

"What 'chance' do you speak of?" Shamsiel interrupts sharply. "This is the apocalypse, Castiel. Michael is gone. What _chance_ do you think we have?"

Lisa moves between them, arms folded. Shamsiel is the one she glares at, though. "Michael ordered you to protect me and Ben, didn't he?"

"Of course." Now Shamsiel just looks confused. "My duty is to protect you."

"That girl is going to stay with me." Lisa nods to Grace, who's standing off in a corner with one of Chuck's books, but still has a defiant set to her shoulders. "If Lucifer finds her, he's going to kill all of us. Probably the only reason he hasn't already is because of everything Cas has done to hide this place." She steps closer to Shamsiel, eyes narrowing - and honestly, Lisa's just as scary as any angel or demon when she wants to be. "So you hide them like you hid me. _Now._"

"I - " Shamsiel stops and looks at Cas again. "I will conceal her and her sister, but I can't tell you why Lucifer spared her. There is nothing special about her."

("_And if you were still an angel, you would already know that,_" remains unspoken, but very loud all the same.)

Cas scowls at her and goes back to his piles of books.

After both Davis sisters have gotten their ribs engraved - not without a certain amount of protesting on Nia's end - and Shamsiel has disappeared to wherever it is she goes, Lisa orders Ben upstairs to bed on no uncertain terms. Everyone else collects around the kitchen table like the world's most pathetic war council. Cas has whiskey of some sort because for a mostly-ex-angel he's a bit of a depressed alcoholic, Lisa does too once she gets the bottle away from him, Grace finds herself powdered hot chocolate that probably dates to the Clinton administration, and Adam hands Nia a beer to go with his own because no one has time for liquor laws in the middle of an apocalypse.

No one says much of anything for a long time.

"What happened to Michael?" Grace asks when the silence starts to get truly oppressive. Either Cas or Lisa must have given her a crash course in End Times 101.

Lisa's grip tightens on her glass, but her voice is calm enough. Calmer than it usually is when she talks about Michael, anyway. "We don't know. No one knows what happened to him."

Grace frowns down at the Post-it sitting next to her hot chocolate mug. "Was it one of the Winchesters?"

"Who or what is a Winchester?" her sister asks, and then rolls her eyes when Grace taps her finger on the Post-it and raises her eyebrows in a way that has to mean something like 'research, duh'.

Adam is going to make a bonfire and burn Shurley's whole series. "No, it wasn't the Winchesters. They were both a little _possessed_ at the time." He doesn't mean to spit the word out; it sounds like a curse anyway.

"But - "

"Nobody knows what happened to Michael." Cas's voice is more of a monotone than usual. "It doesn't matter. He wouldn't help us even if he were here."

Grace opens her mouth like she wants to argue and then closes it with a snap. She stares down at her watery hot chocolate. "Then who's going to get rid of Lucifer?"

"Dunno. No one's got the power to beat him." Adam drains his beer before he adds what he knows everyone else is thinking. "No one except you."

Nia's lip twists and suddenly she looks like she wants nothing more than to break her own bottle over his head. "You heard that angel. Gracie's not special. You're the hunter, so _you_ figure out what to do."

"Not sure it's my business anymore," Adam says. He thinks: two sisters, one of whom is something far from ordinary; their father, burning on the ceiling; their own personal family vendetta. He isn't sure how to articulate that, though - how to explain the feeling that something ancient and powerful is trying to grip the Davis family and use them to pull itself back on course.

But maybe Nia understands anyway, because some of that steel from before is back in her voice. "It's not Gracie's business, either. I won't let it be."

"Too late for that," Cas mumbles. "You're already here with us." And since Lisa won't give the bottle back, he stands up to go in search of more whiskey.

* * *

That night he dreams of fire, except his mother is burning instead of Eli Davis. Ben is there, despite the fact that Ben has never been on a hunt and will never be if Adam can possibly help it, and all that matters - the most important thing in the world - is getting him out.

"I don't think you get it," Lucifer says, as Adam shoves Ben behind him and reaches for his gun. "You're a replacement. You're _substandard_. If your brother never had a prayer, what makes you think you do?"

He jolts awake to find himself on the downstairs cot with Grace Davis peering down at him.

"Weird dream?" she asks.

"Yeah," he mumbles as he throws his arm across his eyes. Everyone here has nightmares; she doesn't need to hear about his.

"Me, too," she says, and then she sits down on the floor with her back against his cot and a flashlight trained on one of Shurley's books, and together they wait for the sun to rise.

* * *

This is what Grace Davis dreams that night:

She is in her house before it burned to the ground. The kitchen is bright and clear and sunny, and for some reason everything smells like pie.

There is a man sitting in her father's usual seat at the kitchen table. She doesn't know him. He has short hair and some kind of necklace around his neck, and he has his fingers laced behind his head and is slouched so low he's practically sliding under the tablecloth.

But this doesn't fool her. His eyes are too sad and too desperate.

"You doing okay?" he asks.

Grace shakes her head. This is a dream, she reasons, and in dreams it's okay to be honest.

The man straightens out of his slouch and folds his arms on the table. "I'm sorry, kid," he says, and he sounds like he means every word and then some. "I'm really sorry. This should never have happened to you or your family."

His throat has been cut, so deep that she can see bone.

She wonders if he knows.

* * *

A few days later, Adam and Cas leave Lisa holding down the fort in Sioux Falls and drive to Pierre for a standard salt-and-burn. The ghost is benign, more annoying than dangerous, and the job is about as safe as any come these days, so Adam lets himself be talked into taking the two girls. It will be good for them, Lisa argues - a way for them to see that they have some control and aren't being besieged by the entire supernatural world.

He's fine with it until the music fight happens.

It's his fault, really. He's tired, Cas was up all night with Biblical commentaries and is sound asleep in the back seat, and Nia still has her driver's license on her. He doesn't want to be away from Singer Salvage for any longer than necessary and he's not picky about who drives the Chevy as long as long as nothing drastic happens, so they pull over and swap seats - Nia driving, Adam in the passenger seat, and Cas still snoring away in the back with Grace and her book and Post-its.

And it's all well and good until they get back on the road and Nia takes over the radio.

There aren't many stations in rural South Dakota - and most of those definitely swinging towards paranoid survivalist mode these days, like radio stations everywhere - but somehow she manages to find something that she claims is music.

That's a complete lie. It's not music; it's some kind of aural WMD.

Adam groans. "What is this crap?"

"Better music than you listen to," Nia says with a smirk and a glance at the pile of cassettes.

"This is my car, you know. Not my cassettes, but my car."

"Tough shit."

Grace, bless her, actually leans forward between the front seats and makes a grab for the radio, only for her sister to swat her hand away without taking her eyes off the road, like this happens all the damn time. She treats Adam to a commiserating look before pouting at Nia. "He's right. This stuff sucks."

"What are the rules, Gracie?" Nia sing-songs far too cheerfully. "Driver picks the music."

"Yeah, and back seat is gonna kick you in the head, buttface." Gracie sticks out her tongue and then beats a strategic retreat where she slips off her shoe and does in fact try to poke the back of Nia's head with her toes. Nia retaliates by cranking the so-called music up to ear-splitting levels.

Cas snores away in the back seat, somehow. It's probably one of his leftover angelic powers. Adam kind of hates him for it.

He lasts twenty miles before he orders Nia to pull over and evicts her and her shitty music from the driver's seat.

* * *

"Are you going to teach me or not?" Nia asks the day after they get back.

They're sitting around the table eating toast, her and him and Lisa, because it's Cas's turn to cook and he has yet to master anything more complicated than bread and butter. Adam looks up from scanning the newspaper - the Dow Jones isn't so much falling as imploding and half of Chicago is flooded - and across the table he sees Lisa do the same.

"I did," he says. He's not sure what else he _can_ say. "I already showed you how to deal with ghosts - "

"And that'll beat Lucifer? Salt and fire?"

Cas clears away her empty plate and stacks it in the sink with the others. "Nothing is going to protect your sister from Lucifer except your sister herself."

"Not what I want to hear," Nia snaps. She turns to Lisa. "Look," she says, and somewhere under that defiant anger Adam hears pleading. "If it were Ben instead of Grace, what would you do?"

Lisa folds up her section of the newspaper slowly and carefully, like she's buying herself time.

"I think that I would learn how to hunt," she answers.

Then she looks up at Adam and shrugs - just a little lift of her shoulders, as if she's saying "_what can you do?_"

And Adam knows he's lost.

He teaches Nia what little he knows. It's not much, just what he's scraped together from Bobby's books and Sam's lessons and his own hard-won experience.

She's good at it.

Not good enough to stop Lucifer - no one will ever be, with the sole exception of the little sister she wants to throw herself into the line of fire for - but good all the same.

* * *

Everyone in that house has nightmares. Adam dreams of his mother and the ghouls, or of Zachariah and hemorrhaging blood. More and more, he dreams of Ben.

"You're starting to annoy me, Adam," Lucifer says as he circles and circles. "This isn't what happened. This isn't how it _works._"

He stands behind Ben and drives a knife through his heart and Adam wakes up screaming.

* * *

On Thanksgiving freak F5 tornadoes tear through Omaha and an entire town in Massachusetts commits ritual suicide. Adam is favoring his left leg and Cas's right arm is in a sling after a close encounter with a particularly nasty demon two days before; they both still stink of sulfur.

Lisa makes something resembling Thanksgiving dinner, explaining hand turkeys to Cas while she sets everyone else to work doing useful things like checking salt lines and chopping vegetables. They crowd around the table, so close everyone's elbows jostle, and Grace says a prayer because no one else really wants to - or, for that matter, still believes enough to try.

It's almost normal. Almost.

Afterwards, Adam helps Lisa wash up like he does every night, like he did with his mother when she was still alive. There is a pistol tucked in the waistband of her jeans; she is, he has learned, a much better shot than he will ever be.

He knows what Dean's conditions were, because Michael had seen fit to inform them: no smiting Cas, no hurting him or Bobby or Sam - although he's pretty sure that went right out the window after Detroit - and protecting Lisa and Ben. And despite the fact that he's lived with Lisa for months and has realized she is the closest thing he will ever have to a terrifying older sister, he's never really worked up the courage to ask why.

So halfway through drying a pot, he looks over at her and says, "Why was Dean so worried about you and Ben?"

Lisa's hands go still in the soapy water. She tilts her head just enough to peer at his face like she's searching for something.

"You didn't have any other family growing up," she says, "did you?"

He swallows back memories and turns his attention to the pot. "Just my mom." Even now, he thinks, _even now_ he's half-sure he would sell the whole world to get her back. "Just me, now."

Lisa goes back to the dishes. She's quiet for a long time. Adam doesn't dare look at her, so he reaches blindly for new dishes and keeps his eyes down.

"Ben looks a lot like him," she says suddenly.

Adam lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He thinks he knows what some of Lisa's nightmares must be.

"Yeah," he agrees, "he does."

He doesn't ask if Ben has ever dreamed about angels.

* * *

Cas agrees to explain how to do exorcisms, partly because nine times out of ten he knows more about demons than anyone else in the room and partly because he lost at Rock Paper Scissors. Grace takes notes in her perfect gel-pen handwriting and drags Ben outside to practice drawing devil's traps in the dirt. Adam can't remember the last time either of them went to school.

"What about me?" Nia asks. She's commandeered a flannel shirt that probably belonged to Sam at one point, judging by how it fits her like a tent.

"You're learning first aid," Adam says with a grin. It feels nice to be honest-to-God _good_ at something all on his own, rather than relying on hand-me-down information. "That way you can save my life if I get chewed on by a wendigo."

She rolls her eyes, but sits cross-legged next to him and listens. He watches her face, sees her forehead wrinkle in a frown as she takes her own notes - sloppy and disorganized like Cas's angel scrawl.

When she looks up, her lip quirks and she says, "I'm not into guys, Milligan."

"Get over yourself," he retorts without any heat in it, and then flips her off when she laughs and punches his shoulder hard enough to bruise.

* * *

It is the winter solstice. A volcano erupts somewhere in the Northwest, snow buries the eastern seaboard, and the president declares martial law in three cities. Adam drives down to Nashville with Cas and Nia to kill a possessed Christmas tree - because yes, even at the end of the world, some hunts actually are that stupid.

They're on their way back and picking pine needles out of their hair when Shamsiel decides to appear in the back seat.

Once the inevitable chaos erupts and subsides - Nia punches Shamsiel out of reflex and then swears and cradles her hand, Adam yells at everyone to shut the fuck up, Cas continues driving with his usual disregard for basic traffic safety - they finally manage to pull off the road and into a deserted parking lot somewhere in nowhere, Indiana.

"What the hell?" Adam snaps once the Chevy's parked and no one's actively reaching for a weapon. "How did you even find us? I thought we were angel-proofed!"

"I watched the roads." Shamsiel sounds just the tiniest bit smug. "Your vehicle is distinctive."

He remembers saying almost the same thing to Sam just before Detroit. Sam had refused to even entertain the idea of getting a different car then; Adam won't consider it now, despite the fact that the Chevy sticks out like a sore thumb. "Whatever," he mutters. "What was so important that it couldn't wait until we got home? Lucifer?"

"Zachariah," Shamsiel says.

Adam sucks in a breath. For a moment he's so angry anything he might say catches in his throat.

Cas can speak, though, and Cas sounds _furious._ "What does Zachariah want?"

"I don't know," Shamsiel says quickly, defensively. "I would tell you if I did - but I know that Zachariah has discovered something and he is very upset about it."

"Discovered what?" Cas snaps.

Shamsiel darts a glance at Nia. "Something about her family. I can explain more when you return home, but I wanted to find you quickly in case - " And here she stops and her face closes up, whatever she means disappearing behind her usual placid angelic expression.

Cas seems to understand anyway. "In case they caught you," he finishes. "You wanted to warn us while you still had the chance."

"Michael charged me with protecting Lisa and Ben Braeden. I don't believe Zachariah or those who follow him will take Michael's orders into consideration, if they choose to attack Lisa's friends." She sets her shoulders in what Adam has come to recognize as the angel equivalent of a shrug. "I'm only doing my duty."

"Um." Nia raises her hand - the one she didn't use to punch Shamsiel in the jaw, Adam notices. "Who's Zachariah?"

"A very dangerous angel," Cas answers immediately. "And an assbutt."

"So I guess I should get the holy oil out of the trunk?"

"I think that would be wise," Shamsiel answers. Then she blinks. "You have sticks in your hair."

Nia laughs - a quiet sound, but a laugh nonetheless - and scrambles out of the Chevy to rummage through the trunk.

They drive back well over the speed limit, with guns and knives in their laps. There is no music.

* * *

It is the day after Detroit and Eli Davis stumbles out of his wrecked car. The man he hit - the man who appeared out of thin air right in his path - stands in the middle of the otherwise empty road. His hands are bleeding and his eyes are desperate.

The bleeding man is important. Eli Davis is not and will never be; he is utterly ordinary, the most human of human beings.

"Hey," the man says as Eli catches himself on what's left of the hood of his car and stares. His voice is thick with strain and he is holding a sword that gleams in the sunlight. "Just so you know, I'm about to ruin your life."

* * *

The kitchen is starting to get crowded.

Shamsiel sits at the head of it, stiff and careful, occasionally looking down at the floor when Cas stares at her for too long. The others surround them, in chairs or perched on the counter or just hovering in the doorway.

All things considered, they make a pretty shitty anti-apocalypse team.

Shamsiel's explanation is straightforward enough, as it turns out. Eli Davis did _something_ the day after Detroit. No one knows what, no one knows how, no one knows who or what helped him - but he wasn't supposed to, he wasn't even a footnote in the grand sweeping schemes of Heaven and Hell, and now there are spiderweb cracks spreading through the whole of Creation that can all be traced back to him.

"Zachariah believes he killed Michael," Shamsiel concludes, speaking slowly and carefully like she can't quite believe what she is saying. "He wonders if his daughters might be capable of something equally - " She stops and falters and looks more lost than anyone has any right to.

"Equally impossible?" Lisa offers.

She gets a single nod in reply.

Adam shudders. He has had brief encounters with Michael, all of them when the asshole was wearing Dean's face, and didn't get much of an impression besides sanctimonious overpowered dickery. He does know that Michael was supposed to be one of the strongest beings in existence, though. Too strong for just anything to kill.

But maybe Eli Davis didn't qualify as 'just anything'.

"You said it yourself," Cas says into the silence. "Grace is ordinary."

"And you said that she stopped Lucifer," Shamsiel retorts.

Adam looks over at Grace, who is standing off to one side with Ben, her lips thinned into a taut line and her arms crossed protectively over her chest. "Hey," he says, trying and mostly failing at keeping his voice light. "If you have Devil-zapping powers, now's a really good time to share with the class."

She shakes her head. "I don't."

"You could," Lisa says gently, because Lisa's Lisa and doesn't address the obvious fact hanging in the air around them: that Grace isn't normal, that Grace faced down a fallen archangel and lived to tell about it. "If your dad had some power that let him kill Michael, maybe you have it, too."

"I _don't_," Grace snaps at the same time as her sister says, "She _doesn't._"

"It might not matter," Cas points out, sounding haggard and old. "Heaven believes you do."

No one knows how to argue with that.

* * *

This is what Grace Dvis dreams that night:

She is in an empty field, sitting on the hood of Adam's car. The star-filled sky above her is infinite and vast and more beautiful than anything she has ever seen.

"Hi, kid," someone says beside her, and suddenly the man she dreamed of before is sitting with her, a beer bottle held loosely in one (bleeding) hand.

Grace looks up at the stars. "Everyone's saying I can stop Lucifer."

"Can you?"

"No."

"But you did."

She nods. There is no point in denying that here. "Only for a second, though."

"Yeah, well." He shrugs, big and expansive. "Sometimes a second's all you need. That second saved your sister's life."

And for that she would march off to face Lucifer with a song on her lips, because if there is one thing Grace knows with absolute certainty, it is that she would do the impossible to protect her family.

"Someone's cut your throat," she says instead.

The man laughs a little. "I know. Don't worry about it."

She wants to ask why, but then there's a sound like the flutter of wings and another man is there: older, white-haired, wearing a suit. His smile, slimy like oil, slides off his face when he sees who Grace is sitting with.

"You can't take a hint," he says, "can you?"

The man with the cut throat rests his hand on Grace's shoulder; the pressure is comforting, somehow. "Beat it, Clarence. She's not interested."

There is a flash of light, bright and sudden.

She opens her eyes.

She is rolled up in a sleeping bag. Ben is across from her and her sister has contorted herself into a chair, curled up under a small mountain of blankets.

"Are you awake?" Ben whispers.

Grace props herself up on one elbow and Ben does the same. He is a lot younger than her, she knows, but he has been here longer. He has lived this _life_ longer.

"Duh," she whispers back.

"Bad dream?"

Not the worst one she's ever had. Not like the ones where she stumbles into her house and finds Nia _and_ her father dead. Not like the ones where she discovers this house aflame, the tenuous new family she's constructed for herself lost forever.

"Just a weird one," she whispers. "You?"

"Same here," Ben mutters, and then flops back on the sweatshirt he's using as a pillow.

She almost asks if he also dreams about the man with the cut throat, but then her sister stirs in her sleep and she burrows back into her sleeping bag before Nia can throw a pillow at her.

* * *

Winter slips into spring. Three hurricanes slam New England in rapid succession and Los Angeles is hit by an 8.2 earthquake. Every oil field in Texas goes dry. An entire corner of Idaho catches fire. They hunt when they can and save people when the chance presents itself. No one comments on the fact that these chances are coming fewer and further between.

Nia goes on more and more hunts. In all honesty, she is better at this supernatural vigilante shit than Adam will ever be. She has an instinct for when to duck and and when to throw a punch, which weapons to use, how to dive into dangerous situations and emerge more or less unscathed.

It reminds him a little - a _lot_ - of Sam, and that kind of scares him.

Shamsiel becomes a semi-permanent fixture at Singer Salvage, hovering in the background like she doesn't quite belong. Adam isn't sure when he starts thinking of her as part of their team - or as anything besides the bodyguard Lisa never asked for and doesn't particularly want - but at some point he finds himself not even blinking when Nia hands her a book and tells her to make herself useful.

"Yes," Shamsiel says, "of course," and she plops down next to Nia, still wearing her vessel's lacy blouse and enormous frilly boho skirt, and looks about the happiest Adam's ever seen her.

"Aren't you going to get in trouble?" Lisa asks as she peers over the top of her own tome. "For helping us?"

"Of course not," Shamsiel answers far too airily. "It is my duty."

Lisa's raised eyebrow suggests that she believes exactly none of this.

Shamsiel manages to look affronted without doing more than tilting her head. "Michael was not specific about what to protect you from. It is hardly my fault if Heaven is full of...of _dickfaces_."

There is a long, long pause before Cas looks up from the no-doubt-inaccurate prophecy he's been trying to make heads or tails of.

"Which one of you," he asks with an air of exasperation, "taught an angel of the Lord how to say 'dickface'?"

Nia raises her hand, unrepentant.

"Of course," Cas mutters. "Why am I not surprised?" He turns back to the prophecy, his shoulders set in a manner Adam has learned means 'I am the only adult here and am ignoring all of you until dinnertime.'

They really are the shittiest team ever.

* * *

There is a conversation that happens later, out of the others' earshot.

Nia sits on the hood of one of the cars in the salvage yard, a beer bottle dangling between two fingers. "Seriously," she says. "You're screwed, aren't you?"

"If you mean I am in trouble with Heaven, then yes." Shamsiel is sitting next to her; she has a better grasp of personal space than some angels, but they are still so close they almost touch. "I'm doing my duty. No one can claim I'm not."

"Is Heaven going to kill you?"

"I will make things difficult for them if they try," she says, and Nia laughs in a way that shows all her teeth.

* * *

On March 15th, Ben just falls off the face of the Earth.

Adam knows why. Even as the sick feeling of dread pools in his gut, even as he helps the others tear the salvage yard apart searching, even as Lisa rounds on Shamsiel and shouts that she was supposed to protect them - he _knows._

When he finally falls asleep that night, collapsing more out of sheer exhaustion than anything else, he isn't really surprised to find Zachariah in his dream.

He stops himself - barely - from grabbing the angel by his collar and trying to punch his smug self-satisfied face in. "Where the fuck is Ben?"

"No hello?" When Adam just stands there fuming, Zachariah heaves an exaggerated sigh and sits down. They are in a park of some sort - the same place where Adam talked to him months ago, before Detroit, before Adam's hard-headed stupidity led everyone right into Zachariah's trap. "We need to talk about those girls, Adam."

"Not gonna happen."

"Actually, I think it is." Zachariah leans forward, hands on his knees. "You and I both know you're a little, how can we say, _lacking_ compared to your brothers. Frankly, you're a pretty piss-poor replacement."

"I get it," Adam grits out, because he does. "I'm a substandard Winchester. Where's Ben?"

Zachariah just wags a finger at him. "Patience! What I'm telling you is that you do have one very useful thing in common with those brothers of yours." He smiles like a snake, like he's cataloging every one of Adam's weaknesses, and Adam tries to ignore the dread twisting up inside him. "You would do absolutely _anything_ for your family."

He starts to reach for a gun he's not carrying, not here. "You hurt Ben and I swear to fucking God - "

"See? _See?_ This is what I'm talking about." Zachariah spreads his hands and beams. "If you bring those girls to me, you get Ben back. If you don't…"

He snaps his fingers and Adam wakes up.

He's on the downstairs cot, the house is dark, and he can see the shape of Grace sitting by the window, little more than a shadowy silhouette. There are books and notes scattered around her, like she fell asleep studying Shurley's crappy series.

"You were dreaming," she says, perfectly calm and matter-of-fact, and like this it's easy to imagine that there's something strange about the Davis family, that this is the girl who can beat Lucifer.

"Was not." His heart's hammering against his ribs so hard his chest hurts.

"Were too. I could tell. You were kind of - " She flaps her arms around like someone thrashing in their sleep, or possibly like a drunk penguin; just like that, she's an ordinary teenage girl again. "Was it a nightmare?"

"I'm not talking to you about this," Adam mutters. He rolls upright, his feet on the cold floor, and realizes that he knows where he is supposed to bring Grace and her sister. "I'm going out."

He can almost feel Grace's eyes following him. "You're gonna do something stupid, aren't you?"

"I'm going for beer," he lies. "Be back in ten."

Grace huffs, but makes no move to follow him. He's almost out the door when she calls after him. "You're not the only one who dreams about angels, Adam."

Adam ignores the shiver that runs through him and closes the door behind him.

* * *

He will never be able to articulate how he knows where Zachariah's weird art-and-hamburgers holding cell is, but he finds it easily enough. He walks straight past the angel bodyguards in their uniform two-piece suits and his hands hardly tremble when he opens the door.

"_Adam!_"

Ben stands up so quickly that he upends his chair. He races across the room and slams into Adam hard enough to knock the wind out of him, but Adam couldn't care less; he wraps one arm around Ben, gripping the kid's shoulder in a way that has to be painful, and fumbles for his knife with the other.

"I'm sorry," Ben babbles, "I'm sorry, I didn't know, I thought it was a dream, he said he had my mom, I didn't know - "

And then Zachariah is there, right across the room.

"You know," Zachariah says, smiling in a way that doesn't reach his eyes, "there was a time I thought you were the helpful one."

He starts backing toward the door, using his own body to shield Ben. It's going to be cutting it close, cutting his hand and writing on the wall in time to banish everyone, but there was no question of bringing anyone else along with him.

He _will_ do anything for his family. Zachariah was right about that. He just made the definition a little too narrow.

"Sorry," he says - edging for the door, trying to buy time. "I don't help people who've lied to me."

"Lied, omitted, let's not get hung up on technicalities. _You_," and here he points right at Adam, "helped us so much in the past, didn't you? You brought us Dean Winchester."

Ben stiffens against him, rigid like he's in shock, and Adam has to bite back an angry retort. He doesn't want to start hemorrhaging blood again.

Anyway, Zachariah's right about that, too, and aside from not being able to save his mother somehow, it's hard to think of anything Adam regrets more. He may not have particularly _liked_ Dean in the short time he knew him, but he will never live the gnawing guilt of what happened to him down.

"Yeah?" His voice is mostly steady. "Look how well that turned out for you. I don't exactly see you guys winning any apocalypses."

Zachariah sighs. "Adam, Adam, _Adam._ Sam really was a terrible influence on you, wasn't he?" He moves closer; the door isn't budging, so Adam puts the table between them and tries to remember if he taught Ben how to banish angels. Maybe. He hopes so. "We need those girls you're hiding."

"No can do, sorry." He presses the knife into Ben's hand, ignores the boy's wide-eyed look, and steps away from him. That will buy him a few more seconds.

"We don't have to stick around, you know." Zachariah sounds annoyed now. This is going to get painful really fast. He doesn't dare look back at Ben. "What do you think Lucifer will do to this lovely planet if we give him the run of the place?"

He's heard enough of Shurley's incoherent drunk voicemails to have an idea. It's nothing good. "Because you guys are doing such a fantastic job right now," he says instead.

Zachariah's eyes narrow. "Which is why we would like the girls. Where are they, Adam?"

"Bite me."

He isn't sure what Zachariah says after that, because that's when his internal organs start liquefying.

An eternity of pain later, a strong hand grabs him - but gentle, careful - and suddenly he can breathe again. He looks up in time to see Shamsiel crouching over him before she stands up in one smooth motion and punches one of Zachariah's goons straight through a wall. He's handed off to Lisa and Ben - Ben who looks shaken but unhurt, who's _alive_ - and they sling his arms over their shoulders and start to stagger for the door.

A bright blinding light fills the room and shouts and the roar of collapsing masonry fill his ears.

When he can see again, Zachariah is dead on the ground, the black charred outline of wings spread around him, and Cas is standing over him, pulling a blade out of his chest.

Adam manages something that might possibly be, "How?"

"Grace woke us up," Cas says, "and Ben prayed, and you are an _idiot_."

* * *

This is what Grace Davis dreams that night:

She is in the passenger seat of the Chevy. Shurley's last book, the one she is reading now, is open her lap and covered in her Post-its. There is loud music blasting from the speakers.

"This is just as bad as Nia's stuff," she mutters.

"Driver picks the music," the man with the cut throat says from the driver's seat. He glances down at the book. "Anyone ever tell you you're a huge geek?"

Grace looks out the window. They are traveling through farmland so perfectly flat that she can see the shadows of clouds on the ground and the columns of rainfall in the distance, five or maybe ten miles away. "My sister. All the time."

The man nods towards the book. "You know how that ends?"

She knows the whole complicated family drama leading up to the end of the world, maybe better than anyone else; she reads and she listens and she is, after all, a good student. She knows what happened to the family before hers, with brothers instead of sisters and a bloodline and prophecies and a dead mother instead of a dead father. She knows that only angels can kill angels.

"Dean Winchester goes to Hell," she says.

"You remember why?"

"He sold something to save his brother." She doesn't say: _He wasn't wrong._

The man with the cut throat grimaces. "These things don't always work like they're supposed to, kiddo."

She shrugs. There is a barn in the distance, the only trace of human life in the endless fields. "I'm not who the angels think I am."

"You're a regular kid, right? That's what you're going to say?" When she nods, he gives her a lopsided, sad smile. "You didn't die. You stopped Lucifer." The man's smile is more real when he says this - happier - but it happens so quickly that she's not even sure she sees it. "You don't get to be ordinary anymore."

"My dad was."

"What, ordinary?"

There is nothing written about Eli Davis in Heaven or Hell. She knows that, too. "Yes."

"Sure he was. Doesn't mean he didn't kill Michael. Doesn't mean he didn't save the world."

The man says it like a simple statement of fact.

* * *

It takes a long time - weeks - for Ben to talk to Adam again. When he does, he climbs into the passenger seat right as Adam's about to go into town for groceries and starts going through the cassette tapes with the air of someone examining holy relics.

"Did you know that angel was going to trap Dean?" he asks.

Adam doesn't have the guts to turn and face him, so he settles for slouching against the steering wheel and staring out over the hood of the car. Thick black storm clouds are gathering on the horizon, and it occurs to him that South Dakota is due for its own share of the apocalypse sooner or later.

"I thought it was supposed to be me," he says. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Ben go very still next to him. "Turns out I was just bait."

"Like I was." Ben's voice is very quiet, and if Adam had his way he would resurrect Zachariah just for the pleasure of chucking holy oil firebombs at him.

He makes himself smile. "I won't get caught in any more stupid angel traps if you don't."

Ben nods. "Deal," he says. Then he holds up one of the cassettes. "Have you listened to this one yet?"

Adam isn't the biggest fan of AC/DC, but he shrugs anyway. "Stick it in. We can listen on the way to the grocery store."

Fairly awful classic rock fills the Chevy, Ben grins, and for a few minutes Adam is happier than he's been in a long time.

* * *

Somewhere around April, Becky Rosen calls Adam at five in the morning to demand that he set up a chat with her and Cas and Lisa. ("Stop complaining. Lucifer hasn't killed Skype yet.") He yawns hugely - there was a pack of vampires up in Bismarck for some reason and he didn't get back from that clusterfuck of a hunt until midnight - but when Becky threatens to read one of her internet stories to him he flails his way off the cot and sets about prodding the other two awake. There are some things worse than being punched by a half-awake sleep-deprived hunting partner.

She's right, it turns out. The world may be ending and the American government may be a very small step away from total collapse, but Skype still works.

"So Chuck just emailed me all these files," she says once the three of them are crowded around Lisa's laptop and Adam's cajoled their shaky unreliable internet connection into behaving. "They're really weird."

Adam debates calling Shurley just for the pleasure of yelling at his voicemail again. It's like shouting at the sky for all the response he gets, but it's therapeutic "You called us to tell us he writes weird stories? _Really?_"

"That's the thing. They're weird, but they're kind of...not?" She wrinkles her nose at the pile of paper sitting next to her. "Don't get me wrong, the writing's amazing as ever, even if Sam's not in enough of it, but they're pretty accurate up until - this one, I think." A stack of paper identical to all the others gets waved in front of her webcam. "This one is where it gets strange."

Cas doesn't so much move to sit next to Adam as just elbow him aside. He leans so close to the screen that he's practically touching it, which in other circumstances would be pretty damn hilarious. "Define 'strange'."

"For starters? In this book here, Chuck wrote that Michael possessed Adam, not Dean."

Adam feels bile rise in his throat. He curls his fingers in the fabric of his sweatpants to keep his hands from shaking. "Yeah, well." Somehow he keeps his voice level. "That's not what happened."

Becky rolls her eyes. She's never really liked Adam all that much. He gets the impression she thinks he's a poor substitute, to which he can only think: _Join the club._ "I _know_ that. It seems like Chuck doesn't, though. I thought he was supposed to be a prophet."

"He is," Cas says. "An annoying one."

That gets him a huff and her focusing on Lisa, apparently deciding she's the sanest person in the room. "Anyway. In Chuck's books, Michael," and here she looks very pointedly at Adam, "and Lucifer go fight it out in a cemetery somewhere, Michael wins, boom! The world ends. That was supposed to happen months ago."

"But it didn't," Lisa says.

Becky leans forward, arms propped on the heaps of paper, and beams. "Nope!"

Cas sits back from the screen like it offends him. "You are very cheerful for someone reading about the apocalypse."

"But that's just it. I don't think I am. At least not our apocalypse." Becky's face acquires that extra-intense expression she gets sometimes - which is pretty damn scary, since this is Becky they're talking to. "Chuck's a prophet, right? He sees what's going to happen. Except now he's not."

"So...what?" Adam feels the beginnings of a headache coming on, and not just the usual one he gets from dealing with her for more than five minutes. "The end of the world isn't happening the way it's supposed to?"

Becky's eyebrows climb towards her hairline. "_So_ you guys are off-book. There doesn't have to be an end of the world. You're writing your own story here. Like I did, but with more apocalypses and fewer sex scenes."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," he mutters. "And that still means we have to stop Lucifer, Becky."

"Urgh, Sam was so much easier to talk to." Becky leans forward, almost in imitation of Cas, so she's the one who's nose-to-nose with the screen. "That's your problem, mister. I'm just the girl with the unpublished original manuscripts."

Lisa gently moves Cas out of the way so she can sit between him and Adam. "Becky, have you read all of those already?"

Becky looks at her like she's asking if the Earth goes around the sun. "Of course."

"Then could you tell us what Chuck wrote about the Davis family?"

Becky blinks. Repeatedly.

"The _who?_" she says.

And then the internet cuts out.

* * *

Skype seems to be down permanently, but after some quick telephone calls, they get Becky to email them some of the stranger manuscripts before the internet shorts out completely. Grace has become the resident expert on Shurley's series, so she commandeers Lisa's laptop and holes up in a corner with her usual Post-its. One of these days Adam is going to figure out where she hoards those things.

Everyone else returns to Bobby's collections of books with what feels like renewed energy, which lasts until they run into the same problem they always have: even if they're rewriting destiny, even if there is some way to derail the apocalypse, there's still Lucifer to deal with, to kill or shove back in his Cage somehow.

Adam doesn't want to face Lucifer again, and not just because he almost died that day in Eli Davis's house. He doesn't want to die like Bobby did in Detroit, killed by something wearing Sam's face. But that's what's going to happen if he tries to confront him now. It has been months and months and nothing has ever stopped Lucifer, has ever dissuaded him. Nothing has even come close.

Nothing except Grace.

After what happened with Zachariah - after realizing that Heaven can't decide if it wants to launch a preemptive strike against her or turn her into a weapon - he hates even thinking of her as an option, but as more and more days pass, the fact that he saw her face down an archangel gets harder and harder to ignore.

"Nothing here," Nia grumbles as she frisbees an undoubtedly priceless book across the room, where it smacks the wall and falls to the floor miraculously intact. "I think we're running out of books I can read."

"Castiel and I know multiple languages," Shamsiel points out. She is sitting next to Nia like always, but holds her book as far away as possible, as if worried it will be used as a projectile, too. "We can check any books you cannot."

"What good would that do?" Adam asks. He has a headache developing and his eyes ache from focusing on pages and pages of small cramped script. "There's nothing here. Even if Becky's right" - and she _is_, he has to believe she is, it's the only thing keeping them going - "what are we supposed to do? Ask Lucifer if he'll go back in the Cage, pretty-please?"

"The only one who could have beaten Lucifer is Michael." Cas sounds old and tired and he looks like he hasn't shaved in days. "And since Michael isn't here anymore..." He trails off with a resigned sort of shrug that Adam realizes he probably learned from him.

Lisa closes her own book with a snap and slams her hand on top of it. "_No,_" she says. "We are not giving up. There's a way, we just haven't found it yet."

Adam wonders when exactly he realized Lisa is an optimist. He thinks he may have always known. He remembers her ironclad conviction in the first few days after Michael brought her here; he remembers the absolute confidence in her voice as she told Sam that no, Dean would find a way to fight past Michael and come back to them. She believes in people like it's her religion.

It's not a faith he feels particularly inclined to share.

He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands and tries to fight off the tension headache he feels building. "If there was a way, wouldn't someone have found it already?"

"Then we can attempt to save lives, at least." Shamsiel looks almost as bad as Cas, he realizes, and _wow_ that can't be a good sign. He wonders how many shitlists she's on up in Heaven. "I remember a little of how Lucifer thinks, and I am sure Castiel does as well. It may be more productive to concentrate our resources into protecting a small area until we can find a way to effectively counter him."

"What, like a fort? Where the hell do we get a fort?"

Nia rolls her eyes at him. "It doesn't have to be a fort, dumbass. It could be an army base or...I dunno, a private campground or something. Somewhere that holds a lot of people and maybe has walls."

Adam scowls at her and tries to ignore the way Grace is looking at them all over the top of the laptop, her brows slowly furrowing into a worried frown. "You only think it's a good idea because Shamwow over there suggested it."

"You're just jealous because I'm declaring myself captain of Fort Apocalypse," Nia shoots back, and sticks out two middle fingers as a bonus.

They really and truly are the shittiest team ever.

"Can we stop talking about forts?" Lisa asks, except it's more like a command. She has a damn good Mom Voice when she wants to. "Let's keep trying to find ways to stop Lucifer before we start building barricades. There are a lot of people out there we need to try and save."

"Yeah, all seven of us." Nia's good humor has vanished as quickly as it appeared. "I get what those weird prophecies mean, I do, and it's nice to know what we're doing isn't completely fucking doomed from the start - but maybe we should focus on the people we _can_ save?"

"And who's going to decide who the people we can save are? You? Me?" Lisa shakes her head. "No one here gets to make that judgment call."

Nia stands up and stalks towards the door, or at least away from their piles of fruitless research and useless books. "I can't fucking believe you," she growls out. "We find out we can save some people, and no one here has the fucking _balls_ to - "

Grace stands up.

"Everyone," she says softly. "Stop."

And everyone does.

She blinks once, like she didn't expect that to work. Standing there, clutching a fistful of her notes in her hand, with circles under her eyes and the gray cast of fatigue to her face, she looks small and vulnerable and nothing like the not-quite-ordinary girl Adam's come to know.

She looks like she's just walked across her own grave.

"I need to go to Lawrence," she says. "In Kansas."

Cas recovers first. Cas looks like he already suspects something, actually. "Why do you need to go there?"

Grace bites her lip and looks down at whatever is written in her notes. She isn't quite fifteen years old. "I'm pretty sure that's where Lucifer is. And - " She stops and takes a deep breath. Squares her shoulders. Still doesn't look any older. "I don't know exactly how I stopped him before, but - but I _did_. So I guess it has to be me."

"_Fuck_," Nia breathes. "I thought you weren't exactly eager to go fight the Devil. Where did this come from, Gracie?"

"We're supposed to be changing things," Grace says. She holds up her crumpled notes. "I know what happens if we go hide in a campground. I _know_. So if it's that or me, then it's not a hard choice."

Her sister makes a noise that's part fury and part frustration and part simple heartfelt pain. With one last "Fuck you, Gracie," she yanks the door open, storms outside, and slams it behind her, hard.

In the silence that follows, Grace sits down again and closes her eyes. She is the one reminding Adam of Sam, this time. He only really knew his brother for two months, between when Dean said yes and Sam did - he's known the people gathered here in Bobby's house longer than he knew the flesh-and-blood family that dragged him into this mess - but he recognizes something of the ragged desperation in her face. It's what took Sam to Detroit.

He looks at Cas. "Is she right about Lawrence?"

"Possibly." Cas still has that look like he was sort of expecting this, or at least isn't surprised by it. "I can take her there."

"I can drive," Grace says, opening her eyes.

"Not legally."

"It's the end of the world and you care that I don't have my license?" She sounds like a mulishly stubborn kid again.

Cas catches Adam's eye and Adam sees...something. After Detroit it was just the three of them, him and Cas and Lisa, but Cas is the only one who's really from _before_ - who knew Dean for more than a couple days, who hunted with Sam when he wasn't hanging on by a thread. He's the one who helped start it; he should be the one to finish it.

Yeah, no. Adam doesn't want to be in the same _hemisphere_ as Lucifer, but Cas isn't facing him alone any more than Grace is.

He will do anything for his family.

"Lisa?" he hears himself say. He looks over at Ben, who has the confused frown of a kid who almost understands what's happening. "Do you think you can explain everything later?"

When she grimaces and nods, he can see what happens next unspooling out in front of him. He knows from painful firsthand experience that the people connected to his brothers and his father's family tend to die. He also remembers the day he looked at the Davis sisters sitting in the back seat of the Chevy - the girls with their burning father, with Grace's strange power, with their own personal vendetta against Lucifer - and knew on some instinctive level that it wasn't coincidence. He thinks that whatever curse the Winchesters had on them has found a new family to settle on.

That probably means he and Cas are going to die in Lawrence, but that's okay.

Because maybe Grace won't. Maybe Grace can do what Sam didn't. Maybe the world will stop ending and the people he has left will be okay.

And then Shamsiel's eyes widen and she vanishes so quickly that she knocks over stacks of books on her way out.

Over the commotion, there is the sound of an engine.

Adam is up and out the door almost before he knows what's happening, but it's too late. The Chevy is vanishing into the evening darkness.

He grips the doorframe with both hands and looks back at them - Lisa half out of her seat, her hand over her mouth, and Cas, who doesn't seem surprised by this either, not really.

"She is very similar to him," Cas says like it's an explanation.

Adam heard Sam's stories before Detroit, told like he wanted someone - _anyone_ - to remember them. He knows exactly who Cas means.

And he thinks Grace does too - Grace with her notes and her memos and careful questions - because she covers her face with her hands and cries.

* * *

This is the conversation that happens in the Chevy:

"What the _fuck_. How are you even here?" Nia snaps at the passenger she didn't have a moment ago.

Shamsiel blinks at her. "You were praying to me. Asking me to take care of your sister." She considers and adds "Duh" with the delicate care of someone speaking a foreign language.

Nia fumbles for something, anything, and finally settles for throwing a cassette in the general direction of the passenger seat. Zeppelin bounces off Shamsiel's shoulder. "You're gonna get cut off from Heaven like Cas, aren't you. For helping us." They're not meant to be questions, so she spits them out as she reaches for another cassette.

This one gets caught almost absentmindedly and carefully tucked off to one side. "Castiel has his family here," she says. "I believe I will find one as well."

"You _stupid_ - " Nia takes a deep breath. "I'm going to look for Lucifer. Why are you still here?"

"Lucifer will kill you," Shamsiel says.

"My dad killed Michael, right? That's what everyone in Heaven thinks. So maybe I can kill Lucifer. If I don't Gracie will think she has to and - " The road blurs in front of her; she swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. "We're not them, me and Gracie. We're just _us_."

"I know."

"Gracie doesn't fucking deserve this."

"Neither do you."

"I'm her big sister," Nia says, because that is the only thing that has ever really mattered. The sky is blue. Two plus two is four. "Jumping into the line of fire is what I'm supposed to do."

* * *

At top speed, with Cas and his complete disregard for things like speed limits and lane lines at the wheel, it will take a little over five hours to get from Sioux Falls to Lawrence. Adam tries not to think about how much of a head start Nia has - tries not to think about what happened to Bobby in Detroit - and settles for cursing as he throws weapons into an old van that he hopes still runs. Someone did a hell of a lot of sabotage before taking off on her Devil-fighting road trip and they've wasted hours - _hours_ - trying to get even one vehicle up and running.

If Nia survives - if _any_ of them survive - he is going to murder her.

"You know where everything is?" he asks Lisa for what's probably the fiftieth time.

She is drawing a devil's trap on the floor of the van, but she pauses long enough to smile at him, tight and close-lipped. "I've been doing this as long as you have," she points out.

"Yeah, but - "

"You're going to come back." The way she says it makes it set in stone. It would be comforting if he didn't remember that she had said the same thing about his brothers: Dean will be able to take control from Michael, Sam will be able to beat back Lucifer.

He doesn't believe in people the way she does.

"Just take care of Ben," he says.

For a moment he thinks Lisa's going to hug him, but all she says is, "Of course I will."

He wouldn't have minded, he thinks. Having brothers and sisters.

"Adam," Cas calls.

Adam pokes his head out of the van. Cas is standing by the driver's side door, in the process of stuffing holy oil and guns in a duffel bag, but his hand is on his knife and he's looking across the salvage yard, where Shamsiel has appeared on the steps next to Grace and Ben.

"Shamwow?" He climbs out of the van, wiping grime on his jeans. "Where're Nia and my car?"

"On their way to Lawrence." Shamsiel pauses. "I was..._reminded_ that my duty is to protect Lisa and Ben."

"Reminded by whom?" Cas asks cautiously - and okay, Adam's heard stories about how Heaven handles rogue angels; now he gets why Cas is holding that knife.

But Shamsiel just looks tired. "Nia threw things at me and threatened to banish me into next Tuesday."

"And you didn't bring her back with you?" Cas has loosened his grip on his knife, but still looks ready to draw it and start slicing open his own palm at a moment's notice.

"Castiel…" She smiles, sort of - just a slight helpless curve of her lips. "What would you have done, in my place?"

Adam really _really_ doesn't want to know the answer to that.

"Shamwow!" he calls, and she jerks her head towards him like she forgot he was there. "Help me and Lisa angel-proof the van. We want to be gone in ten minutes."

"You will not catch her in time," Shamsiel says, but then Cas gives her some kind of unreadable angel look and she moves toward the van without further complaint.

* * *

Sometimes Adam dreams of crossroads and red-eyed demons and Ben gasping back to life.

"You aren't him," Lucifer says, "and this isn't what happened."

(But it will be what happens if it has to, Adam thinks.)

* * *

There is an old cemetery outside of Lawrence.

Nia drives the Chevy into it and climbs out of the car. There is no sound. There is no music. She has a shotgun and a knife and, in the end, no actual plan.

Lucifer is sitting on a gravestone. He looks up as she approaches and his eyebrows raise. "I have to say, you're not the sister I was expecting."

This is the first time she has actually seen him since he threw her across the room all those months ago. She knows she should be afraid, but she can't allow herself to be.

She lifts the shotgun and shoots him dead center in the chest. It does nothing, but it's cathartic.

"That doesn't work," Lucifer says. He stands up, he is much taller and more intimidating than she remembers, and even though he doesn't move towards her, she takes an involuntary step back.

The shotgun gets dropped and she holds up the knife. It's one of Adam's, a fancy thing that kills demons - and sure, it probably won't work on Lucifer, but it's worth a shot.

"You killed my dad and sooner or later you're going to hurt my sister." She shifts her grip on the knife. "I can't let you do that."

"Here's the thing," Lucifer says as he walks toward her. "I know you're trying to protect her. I understand that, I do. But this isn't going to work. There's no happy ending here."

She takes a swipe at him with the knife; he catches her by the wrist and _squeezes_ until the bones grate together and the weapon falls from her nerveless fingers.

"What your father did opened a...path, I suppose you could say. To the same ending, of course, but by a different road." He speaks calmly, like he's talking about the weather; the pressure on her wrist eases just enough for her to stifle a scream. "You should be proud of him. He was _nothing_ compared to my brother," and here his face contorts into pure incandescent hatred and her wrist shatters in his grip, "and look what he did."

He flings her aside like a rag doll.

She flies backward and slams hard against the gravestones and something inside her cracks. It takes everything she has to push herself upright with her good arm, to spit out blood in his general direction and try to stay conscious and desperately hope this will be over before anyone tries to come to her rescue.

"This is where I was going to meet my brother," Lucifer says. He is holding her knife, turning it over and over in his hands. His face is placid again, but something like white-hot fury flashes behind his eyes. "Before your father killed him."

For a split second fear wipes out everything, but then _Gracie Gracie Gracie_ reasserts itself and she squares her shoulders. "You better fucking kill me too," she grinds out, "or so help me God, I will find a way to end you."

Lucifer looks down at her. She can see him considering. Eventually, he says: "You know something? I almost think you would." He smiles. "But I think I've had enough of people doing things they shouldn't."

And before Nia can blink or draw breath or scream, he is in front of her, driving her own knife straight into her gut.

* * *

Outside of Singer Salvage, the clouds hang thick and low and thunder rolls in the distance. Shamsiel watches, anxious, and draws Enochian signs and symbols over the doors.

"Mom?" Ben asks as he checks the salt lines like Adam taught him. "They're okay, right?"

"Of course they are," Lisa says.

She doesn't know how the world works anymore, but she can still have faith.

* * *

This is what Nia Davis sees as she gasps and falls to her knees, her blood spilling over her fingers and the handle of the knife:

Grace is standing at a crossroads with dirt under her fingernails. Then she flickers like static and she is Adam instead, holding Ben's still cold bloody body against his chest and repeating his name over and over and over again.

"But this isn't what happened," Lucifer says, and she closes her eyes and _screams_ -

- and she is four years old and clutching Grace so tightly she can feel her little baby heartbeat fluttering, and her father is burning, her father is mouthing words and she hears "Take Gracie, take Gracie and go - "

_This isn't what happened._

And someone unfamiliar is shaking her.

"Come on," the stranger says, "come on, stay with me, don't do this - "

"Let go of me," she says in her little four-year-old voice.

The man looks at her. There is something terribly sad about his eyes and his hands are bleeding and his throat is cut to the bone. "Can't do that, sorry."

She looks down at her arms. They're empty. "Gracie?"

"Your sister's coming," the man says. That's important, somehow. "You don't get to throw in the towel yet."

She feels a sudden rush of agony and fear and remembers where she is, remembers that she's not quite nineteen and clawing at the knife shoved through her stomach and the man's words don't make any _sense_ because -

Oh God, she can't _breathe_ -

"Your sister's coming," the man repeats, more desperate than before. "Cas is bringing her. You know what that means, right?"

And she does. This, _this_ she remembers, _this_ she's known deep down in her bones since the day Grace was born.

"Do you know what you have to do?"

She's always known. She's the older sister who walks into the line of fire and she's not allowed to give up.

"Don't you do what I did," the man says as he grips her arm. "Don't let her down."

Then he pulls her up and up and -

- and the man is looking at her father and saying "I can't hold him back for long" and "This is the only chance anyone's gonna get" and -

- her father is drawing a blade across the man's throat and light flashes and black wings scorch the earth and the thing inside the man dies -

- and the man dies too, but he is _smiling_.

* * *

They're crossing into Kansas when Grace stops staring out the window and says, "I just wanted him not to hurt Nia."

She doesn't have to say which him she means. Adam glances at Cas, sees his white-knuckled grip on the wheel, and has to choke back the surge of anger. "Are you going to tell us what you did? Finally?"

"It wasn't important," Grace continues like she hasn't heard him. "It would've been worth it. I knew my dad was dead and Nia...she's gonna kill me if she ever finds out." Her eyes catch his and they are old like his brothers' were. "It should've worked. It's part of the story."

Adam goes cold.

"Grace." Maybe he doesn't want to hear this after all. "Grace, what did you _do?_"

She drops her eyes to the Post-its she's brought with her, spread out in her lap across Shurley's last book.

"It would've been fine," she says. "It would've been a good deal."

Cas jerks like he's been struck and almost drives them off the road.

Adam swears and clutches at the dashboard as they barely avoid sideswiping a semi. "Cas," he croaks. Then louder. "_Cas._ What is it?"

But Cas looks like he can't decide if he wants to laugh or cry and for an absurd moment all Adam can think is _he broke, he finally broke._

"Hey," he tries. "You with me?"

Cas doesn't answer. He reaches back without really taking his eyes off the road and wraps his hand around Grace's thin bony arm, right below the shoulder.

"It's part of the story," Grace says. "I told you."

Cas looks at Adam then, and Adam can't even find his voice to tell him to stop being weird or explain what's going on or _look at the road damnit_, because there's _hope_ there.

"Call Lisa," Cas says. "Now. Tell her I know why Lucifer didn't kill Grace."

* * *

"Sometimes a second's all it takes," someone says, a dream and a lifetime ago.

It is the day after Detroit and Dean Winchester stands in the middle of a road next to a ruined car and somehow manages to speak his own words. "That sword will work," he gasps out, "but you have to hurry. I can't hold him back for long."

Eli Davis holds a blade he shouldn't have in steady hands and _cuts_ and destiny collapses in pieces around him.

* * *

Lucifer's gaze is curious. He looks like he's searching for something and isn't quite seeing it.

"Your father never broke," he says. "Did you know that? I asked him how he defeated Michael, but he never told me."

Nia's eyes are half-open. Blood spills from her mouth instead of words and black spots dance in front of her vision.

"You could tell me," he says. "It would save everyone a lot of heartache. Your sister doesn't deserve to lose another member of her family. Not after what she was willing to do."

She fumbles for the knife and thinks: she knows the impossible thing her dad did and how he did it. It's like a fuse burning inside her. She _knows._

The angels are wrong. Lucifer is wrong. Her father wasn't the one who defeated Michael; he was just the one in the wrong place at the wrong time, being begged to end a life and save the world.

"Don't you know what Grace offered to save you?" Lucifer asks.

She thinks: _Gracie what did you give him, Gracie, Gracie please -_

But no, Grace is stronger than Lucifer. Grace is quiet and ordinary, Grace is not a replacement for something that went very wrong, Grace deserves a normal everyday life.

Grace reads fate in trashy prophetic novels. Grace can save the world.

She thinks: big sisters don't get to throw in the towel.

Nia Davis looks Lucifer in the eye and does something impossible, just like the rest of her ruined little family.

She stands back up.

* * *

"What's the point of trying to fight this?" Adam asks once, in the sliver of time between Zachariah's room and what happened in Detroit.

Sam frowns down at the gun he's cleaning and what he doesn't say - what Adam hears anyway, clear as a fucking bell - is _"I'm not failing Dean again."_

"What else are we supposed to do?" he says instead.

* * *

It is two months after Detroit, two months after Sam Winchester says yes, and Eli Davis dies slowly and horribly and never ever breaks.

His younger daughter stumbles back from the Devil, sobbing so hard she can barely speak, pleading with him as she cries.

But not for herself.

Something is gripping the Davis family, wrapping tendrils of fate around them and trying to pull itself back on track. There is a gaping hole where two brothers ought to be, and the Winchester boys were never the only ones who would damn themselves ten times over to save the only family they have left.

"Please," Grace Davis whispers as she bargains and begs. "Please. She's my sister. _Please._"

She is smart and desperate. She knows she will get the better end of the deal.

Her soul is such a small price to pay for her big sister's life.

The Devil stops dead when he hears her offer. He finally, truly_ looks_ at her.

And for half a heartbeat, someone else fights free and he isn't the Devil anymore.


End file.
